With Civil War’s Rancor Faded, Reasons to Celebrate

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The old train depot in Vicksburg, Miss., will be a background for the Fourth of July festivities, including music and fireworks. The town surrendered to Union forces exactly 150 years ago, after a 47-day siege.CreditCreditJames Patterson for The New York Times

VICKSBURG, Miss. — Even when this city was known as the place that did not celebrate the Fourth of July, it was not entirely true.

The people of Vicksburg, as the story goes, abstained from the holiday because of the bitter 47-day siege the city endured at the hands of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, ending with its surrender 150 years ago this July 4. It is a good story, but it depends on what is meant by people of Vicksburg.

“We celebrated the Fourth of July,” said Yolande Robbins, 73, whose great-grandmother was a slave here and who now runs her father’s funeral home. “Our grandparents told us that the real reason we celebrated the Fourth of July is because Vicksburg fell.”

“The young people,” she added, “I don’t think they know that.”

It is hardly a chore these days getting many residents of Vicksburg to get over the siege and celebrate the Fourth — there will be a big party downtown Thursday night, with a blues concert and fireworks — and some young people around town were not even aware of the other occasion this week. The much harder chore would be getting Vicksburg residents, black or white, to come up with strong feelings about the Civil War at all.

The fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, is the less famous blow of the one-two punch landed by the Union armies 150 years ago this week. The other is Gettysburg, as the rangers at Vicksburg National Military Park note with the resigned irritation of a little brother.

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The story was that for years residents did not celebrate the Fourth of July because of the siege. Yolande Robbins, with Tillman Whitley, said her ancestors always did.CreditJames Patterson for The New York Times

Part of this, they say, is simply because of narrative: While the City of Vicksburg was far more strategically vital than Gettysburg, a three-day battle is easier to comprehend than a campaign of months, followed by a prolonged siege during which Vicksburg residents were reduced to eating rats. But also working against them is the reputation of Civil War parks generally, as a destination primarily for military buffs and Lost Cause enthusiasts.

“A lot of local residents don’t see themselves in conjunction with our programming,” said Mike Madell, the supervisor of the park, a grassy and monument-dotted 1,800-acre expanse that wraps around the northeastern corner of the city.

In an acknowledgment of Gettysburg’s fame and the July temperatures in Mississippi, the park in Vicksburg reserved its most ambitious anniversary events for Memorial Day weekend. Still, this week there was a re-enactment of the surrender negotiations, and on Wednesday a group of volunteers spent the afternoon preparing 19,233 lights to place around the park in memory of Vicksburg’s casualties.

The long goal is to bring in new visitors, with a particular focus on attracting black Vicksburg residents, said Mr. Madell, whose last posting was the Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., site of the famous desegregation battle in 1957. As at national Civil War parks across the country, the Vicksburg park forthrightly describes slavery as the underlying cause of the war and highlights the social context of the Vicksburg campaign instead of focusing exclusively on military tactics.

Not everyone has welcomed that.

“There’s a whole lot of nostalgia around here,” David Slay, a historian and park ranger, describing how men occasionally march over to his desk and gripe when they read a placard about the war’s root causes. “Depending on my mood, I’ll engage.”

Mr. Slay mentioned the Old Courthouse Museum downtown — where one finds that the Civil War is “the War Between the States” and the Emancipation Proclamation is “wartime propaganda” — as well as the annual Confederate Christmas ball, which comes to a close every year when a person dressed as a Confederate courier bursts into the room and announces that Union gunboats are on the river.

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A re-enactment of surrender negotiations at Vicksburg National Military Park.CreditJames Patterson for The New York Times

This is based on an actual Christmas party thrown by the great-great-great-grandmother of Jim Hughes, 41, who was helping out on Wednesday at the Lorelei bookstore downtown.

“Personally I don’t think many people today think about the Civil War too much,” Mr. Hughes said.

The biggest recent furor he recalled was when the local newspaper decried the horseplay of some AmeriCorps volunteers at the national park, saying that they had “mostly come from states with deep Federal allegiance” and that their acts could “easily be construed as anti-Confederate.”

Mr. Hughes called such language bizarre, and said some readers had threatened to cancel their subscriptions. “We were horrified,” he said.

Vicksburg, like many other Southern towns, still has a ways to go toward racial progress, he said, but of the old Lost Cause crowd he observed, “I think that culture’s almost gone.”

Since the casinos moved in and elbowed out the greasy spoons, the old retirees in Vicksburg who used to gather over breakfast have moved to the McDonald’s by the Interstate. Over coffee, Henry Wamble, 71, and Lonnie Hollowell, 66, recalled the military park as the place where they would drink beer and make out with girls as teenagers, talked of finding old cannonballs and belt buckles in the woods around Vicksburg when they were young and said that, yes, the city really did once abstain from celebrating the Fourth of July.

“Wasn’t that long ago,” Mr. Hollowell said, but neither could remember exactly when it was.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: With History’s Rancor Faded, Reasons to Celebrate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe